


bottleneck

by leradny



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-05
Updated: 2016-02-05
Packaged: 2018-05-18 10:57:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5925931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leradny/pseuds/leradny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even places die. But Death, as the Vuvalini know it, is a sign that life was once there. The Keeper of the Seeds contemplates the death of the Green Place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	bottleneck

**Author's Note:**

> this is about that one concept about “the vuvalini left the men and boys behind”, which technically did not survive to the final cut so it isn’t canon. i was really fascinated by it. i wondered how anyone could possibly make this action sympathetic if it did happen.
> 
> technically this isn't actually finished. i started this months ago, but then star wars happened. i really like it, and if i wasn’t so busy trying to pay rent and do well in school, i would have more of a plan. but, onwards.

Back in those days, when the Green Place was alive and well, it was considered auspicious if a girl was born with both eyes open, like Furiosa, the child of Jo Bassa.  And it was auspicious if a girl child was a loud crier like Valkyrie, whose voice could tear over the sands like wind.

Even more so that they were born on the same day. Furiosa and Valkyrie were called sun sisters.

When Furiosa and Mary were taken, Valkyrie keened for the Jo Bassas, because the two were the only ones left of a strong and sharp-eyed and fiercely loyal bloodline, and no one came back from the Citadel.

Far seers and strong throats were necessary skills for us, the many mothers of the Green Place–we are rangers, hunters, trappers.  Ambushers.  Seekers of seeds, of distant water.  Danger.  We traveled long, and fought from afar, before our prey could notice anyone was in the area.  We traveled unless we were too heavy with child, and then we stayed in the Green Place until the child was born.

One circuit around the Green Place would take about ten days.  It was always a good day if we were traveling slowly, bikes laden with food, parts, and gifts.  Animal bones were the most common, but not any less precious.  A sign of death was a sign that life had once been there, after all.  We carved them as we rode, on the long nights under the stars.

It was different for the fathers, who stayed at home.  A mute boy was not so lamented, nor a blind boy, like my last and favorite blood-son.  I was not a life-mother, who had the patience for raising children, and my three older children were raised very well by other mothers.  But, at the end of my childbearing years, I found myself with a blind but otherwise healthy boy, with dark skin that would surely tan even darker, and though his eyes were clouded as if with milk, it gave him a unique beauty.

I could not bear to have someone else raise him, even my dearest friend, and so I named him Tinno, and stayed off the circuit for a thousand days, picking out an initiate father to look after him when I was recovered enough to patrol again.  Tinno loved seeds, and I taught him as best I could. I knew the hardy desert plants, but I was in and out of the Green Place too often to give more care.

Father skills were home skills–they needed the slow strength that could shape water and clay and swamp reeds into the whole-houses.  It was not like the quick tents from hide and woven cloth that mothers used while traveling, or the sturdy but inefficient bait-towers.

Not quite one thousand days after Furiosa was taken, I refused a circuit.  Tinno had asked me to stay, because Mait was bedridden with an injured foot.  Tinno had examined it as best he could, but asked me for a second opinion.  My eyes were older, but still good, and they had seen many things.  Or so Tinno told me.

I entered the mud house to find Mait looking pitiful on his pile of mats.  “Now look at you, love!” I said.  “What have you gotten yourself into?”

After a few moments, I found the cut on the sole of his foot–small, red, and swelling, but nothing I had seen before.  “Infection,” I told Tinno.  “You worry too much.  Wash it with clean water, then make a poultice with clematis and tea tree.”  I gave Mait a spade I had carved from the leg bone of a kangaroo.

Mait’s initiate father was waiting at the door, and moved to distract Mait with the spade.  I walked with Tinno just out of the house and lowered my voice.  “You knew that all.  What else are you worried about?”

“Mother, he was playing at the harvest festival,” Tinno said.  “At the Eyes of the Southern Cliff.  Other children there have come down with sickness. The Green Man says it is nothing more than the sort of thing children should have, to become strong.  But some of them are also infected like Mait.  It is too far from the main waters for us to send a proper patrol.  Could you take a look?”

The Eyes are perhaps a three days ride with a light bike.  If the sickness is not what the Green Men say, then we could be dealing with plague.

“I will see what I can see, Tinno.”

Age has been kind to me.  I have lived a good life, and a long one, and I have been brave and loyal.  I am not afraid of plague or any other danger.  What I do now is not for myself, but for the future–the people who will live on and carve a bone of mine into a necklace or a knife.  I hold Tinno’s neck in my weather-worn hand and we touch foreheads.  Mine is creased with age, his with worry.  I do the same with Mait, exactly as I have always done.

\- - -

The Eyes of the Southern Cliff are two pools of water.  Small, with wild animals visiting more often than people, they still offer some level of luxury, shaded as they are by the southern cliff.

The first thing I notice is: There are no animals.

Perhaps the sound of my bike has scared them off. But I walk along both shores and see no tracks or sign fresher than a few weeks.  There are no bugs I can see, or small fish.  And the plants nearest the shore are wilting.


End file.
